Drug and concentration information is presented to the user via audio and visual feedback. The system pulls information from the bar code on the syringe as it’s inserted into the Intelliport injection port.

One of the interesting things about this technology is that to ensure medication safety it relies on syringes labeled with small, 2D barcodes encircling the “hub” of the Leur Lock syringe. This barcode is read by a small barcode reader on the administration device. In that way, the administration device “knows” what drug and drug concentration is being administered.

A lot thought went into the development of the very “intelligent port”, the drug administration device. The image shown is the device used to label the syringes and apply the small barcodes to the Leur Lock hub. Now, who is going to do that? The anesthesiologist…I don’t think so. The pharmacy…sounds like potential 797 issues. The drug manufacturers…very doubtful.

All great products consist of a large number of smaller components (“links”). The weak link in this system appears to be the process of getting the medication safety encoder (i.e., the barcode on the syringe hub). This reminds me in some ways of the earlier DocuSys system, that also relied on a special carrier for the IV syringe that had to be prepared by the pharmacy. That company survived (as Merge AIMS), but without the drug administration component as a standalone Anesthesia Information Management System (AIMS).

There are other ways to accomplish what there are doing with barcodes from a medication safety standpoint that would be far easier to implement.